Contents

Story

A worldwide martial arts tournament is nearing its finale, with a large purse of prize money awarded to the fighter who can defeat Heihachi Mishima in the final round of the competition. The contest is sponsored by the giant financial group, the Mishima Zaibatsu. There are eight fighters that remain after winning death matches all over the world, with the winner of the tournament receiving The King of the Iron Fist title. Only one will have the chance to defeat Heihachi and take home the prize money and fame. The player is initially able to select one of those eight fighters, each one having their own personal reasons for entering the tournament aside from the prize money.

Kazuya Mishima is the main character. Heihachi's biological son, he was thrown into a ravine by his tyrannical father when he was five years old. Heihachi, believing his son was too weak to ever inherit his conglomerate, decided that if he were truly strong enough, he would be able to survive the fall and climb back up. Kazuya barely survived a fall that left him with the scar prominently visible on his chest. Fueled by hatred for his father, he enters the tournament to exact his revenge.

Although all playable characters in Tekken have their own ending upon completion of their particular scenario, depicting events following the tournament as if they were the one victorious, it became a staple in later Tekken games of having only one character's ending as the true canonical one, and the following sequel's storyline is based on what happened after that particular ending.

Gameplay

Tekken is one of the earliest 3D fighting game franchises, with the first game applying many of the concepts found in Virtua Fighter by Sega.

As with many fighting games, players choose a character from a lineup and engage in hand-to-hand combat with an opponent.

Tekken differs from other hand-to-hand fighting games in some ways. Traditional fighting games are usually played with buttons which correspond to the strength of the attack, such as a strong punch or weak kick. Tekken, however, dedicates a button to each limb of the fighter, making learning special attacks more of an intuitive process. The player could watch the animation on screen and figure out the appropriate command: if the character kicks low with their right leg, the move is likely to be executed by pressing down and right kick, or a similar variation.

This is the first time Forest Law appeared, he is seen as a toddler in this ending.

The toddler version of Forest Law is wearing a white tank top and yellow pants.

King's ending features real digitized children, a technique which would later be used again in his Tekken 2 ending.

In the PlayStation version, the Stadium stage has a big screen in the background reflecting the fight.

If a memory card with completed Tekken save data is inserted and the Tekken 3 disc is inserted (with theater mode unlocked), the player can view the endings for Tekken and listen to the games' soundtrack in the theaters 'Jukebox' menu; this also works for Tekken 2.

In Jack's ending video, the machine connected to Jack is named System 11, which is the name of the arcade hardware used in both Tekken and Tekken 2.

With the exception of Wang, the boss characters' voices are identical to other characters.

The reason why is because Namco did not have enough money to get different voice actors for the other characters.

In the arcade version, after selecting a fighter, their facial expressions would change, similar to Virtua Fighter. The character's name is also announced upon character selection.

The only boss characters to have their names announced are Wang, Lee, and Heihachi. Armor King, Prototype Jack, and Devil Kazuya use the same samples as their default characters, King, Jack, and Kazuya Mishima respectively. With other characters, the announcer simply says You Win.

Yoshimitsu and Kunimitsu share the same animated facial expression.

Each stage's background music, with the exception of the Venezia stage, would later be recycled in Tekken 2. Some tracks also made a comeback in Tekken 4, including Venezia.

The intro featuring Kazuya has remixed music in the PlayStation version, but cannot be changed to the original arcade music like the arcade intro in Tekken 2.

If Heihachi Mishima is selected, he must fight all of the sub-bosses; the characters fought are in a specific order: Kunimitsu, Kuma, Wang Jinrei, Ganryu, Lee Chaolan, Prototype Jack, Armor King, Anna Williams, and Devil Kazuya.

The player can listen to all of the game's music with a CD player.

The cover has a blue figure in addition to the eight default playable characters. Based on certain artwork showing more of the cover, it would appear to be a version of Prototype Jack.

In the PlayStation version, due to weaker system specs, the character animations on the character select were removed and their still character images are either the beginning or end of them, with the exception of Heihachi Mishima, who has a slightly different image.